Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Friday Night Ghosts
Episode Date: March 12, 2026In late 1983, five people were abducted from a fast food restaurant before being found brutally murdered in an oil field. The main suspect is believed to be someone with friends in high place...s, until evidence reveals the killers had been hiding in plain sight all along.Marley Spoon: Head to MarleySpoon.com/offer/COLDCASE for up to 25 free meals!Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault.
Listener discretion is advised.
I remember my stepmother stating that she had to run to the restaurant.
I remember pulling the curtain out just a little bit, and I just kind of watched her drive off.
I don't ever remember doing that before.
I have, over the years, thought about Mary and David and Opie and Monty and Joy out there in that oil field.
And there were just so many unanswered questions of who, why, what kind of monster it could have been to do that to them.
There are 120,000 unsolved murders in America.
Each one is a cold case.
Only 1% are ever solved.
This is one of those rare stories.
It's shortly before 12 a.m. on September 23, 1983, and Leanne Raspberry, the manager,
at a local KFC restaurant in Kilgore, Texas,
is unwinding at home after her shift.
Kilgore was, you know, an oil town,
a very nice area, wholesome families.
Everybody kind of knew everybody.
And football was a big thing, you know, being in Texas
at the Kilgore KFC restaurant.
Our biggest day of the week would be Friday
because before the football games,
mothers didn't have time to cook.
The whole town was busy.
Busy, busy, busy, everybody was just gearing up for the big football night.
Her moment of relaxation is disturbed when her phone begins to ring.
It's the Kilgore Police Department.
They tell Leanne that they're over at the restaurant and something isn't right.
Leanne climbs into her car and drives the short distance to the restaurant to meet with the police.
She's informed by officers that something happened after she'd punched out of work following her shift.
The assistant manager, Mary Tyler, was preparing to close up for the night when her daughter, Kim Miller, stopped by for a visit.
Lisa Foster, Mary Tyler's stepdaughter, recalls what happened next.
When Kim got there, she had noticed the front door being locked, so she went around the back.
The back door was wide open.
Then nobody's there.
Kim slowly approached the back door and peered inside the restaurant.
Kim's step-sister, Denise Maynard, describes what she found.
My step-sister found the place to disarray.
She immediately called my dad to see if Mary was at home.
At the end of each shift, it was Mary's duty to deposit the day's cash at the bank.
Kim's heart sinks to the pit of her stomach, as she's informed by her father that Mary isn't at home.
Kim and her father proceed to call local hospitals and emergency rooms to make sure that Mary hadn't been in some kind of accident.
Once they found out, Mary wasn't in the ER.
That's when he said, okay, let's call the police department.
Mary was a dear friend.
We shared a lot of time together at work, and we talked a lot on the phone.
She was a single mom for several years, and she would talk about working extra hours
just to have enough to maybe buy something one of the kids needed for school.
And she struggled, she struggled, I'm sure, because I was a single mom myself.
And then Mary married Billy Tyler, and it was so sweet to see him together because she was about 5 foot 2, and he was probably 6 foot 2.
She just loved it when he came in the restaurant, and he was pretty crazy about her.
I don't know what Drew, my dad and Mary together, but he said that she was the love of his life.
We were from divorced parents, didn't have a mom around for a while, and then Mary came in a picture, and she just, it was in family.
At the time, Mary already had three children of her own, Tony, Kim, and Bubba.
But still, Mary made no qualms about taking on two more.
Mary was as proud of them as if they were her biological children.
She would just brag on them and say what neat things they had done.
And her son was probably seven at the time.
He was handicapped.
He had some disabilities, and she just, oh, Lord, she loved that.
boy and he loved his mother.
Mary worked long
hours at KFC, but as soon
as she came home, she always
made sure to fix her family up
something nutritious for dinner. And then
they all sat down together at the kitchen
table to chat about their day.
She took us underneath her wings. It was just
like we were her own. We were hers.
An officer walked with me
through the restaurant, I guess, you know,
to get a picture of what
may have happened. All the money had been
taken out of the registers and
there was a good bit of blood
kind of spattered and things were scattered
like there had been a struggle.
Well, the police were curious to know
who should be there, so we went and looked
at the time cards.
When police checked Mary's time card,
they find she hadn't punched out of work for the night.
Neither had her co-workers,
20-year-old Joey Johnson,
and 39-year-old mother of three,
Opie Hughes.
We didn't have titles, but unless you were
cook and she wasn't a cook. Lord, she was too short to be a cook. Opie was a packer. You fill the orders.
And it was funny because the boxes were way to we had to put the boxes down lower when Mary was
home duty so she could get to them. And it was kind of a joke about Opie being so short.
But she was as big a person as you could know. She was a treasure. She had two daughters in high
school and they're fixing to be seniors and the expense gets pretty good.
and I think she just wanted her kids to have every opportunity that she could afford them.
Joey was attending college at Kilworth College.
He had a black belt in karate.
He was very athletic and intellectual and just really a super guy.
A search of the restaurant parking lot reveals the three missing coworkers' vehicles.
I just, my gut just, you hear people say my heart failed.
That's what it was.
It was fear.
Police are just about to start searching for the missing women
when a frantic woman arrives at the restaurant.
She tells police her husband David Maxwell is missing.
Former assistant attorney general Lisa Tanner
recalls the scenario.
David Maxwell was also an employee of the Kentucky Fried Chicken
and was a frat brother with Joey Johnson.
Lana informed law enforcement that David had gone up to the KFC
to meet up with Joey.
when he got off work, along with another frat brother, Monty Landers.
David and Monty had been hanging out in the restaurant
waiting for Joey to get off.
Police learned that Monty Landers and David Maxwell
are also missing.
I was in disbelief.
It was a void and a hollowness and a fear for their safety.
We waited for them all night at the police station thinking,
they're okay and they're going to get to a phone.
and, you know, they're going to be found.
The families of the missing people
return home for a sleepless night of tossing and turning
as police begin their search.
At 9.30 the next morning, an employee at an oil field
in rural Rusk County, about 12 miles or so away
from the KFC restaurant,
is driving to the wells when he spots something unfamiliar
in the weeds in the near distance.
As he gets closer, he can see that it's four people lying down
next to one another alongside the road.
District Attorney Michael Jimerson describes what happened next.
And so he yells at him to get up, thinking maybe there's just been some sort of party
and these people have fallen asleep.
He walks up there and realizes that they're dead.
Investigators working on the KFC disappearance determined fairly quickly that the four bodies found
match the description of some of the missing people.
A couple of them are clad in their KFC uniforms, but there are only four bodies.
They were in a row from left to right.
They are identified as Joey, Mary, David, and Monty.
They were all lying on their stomachs with their heads on their hands.
They were shot in the back of the head or in the back multiple times.
This was an execution.
Cold Case Files is brought to you,
by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Progressive loves
to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called AutoQuote Explorer that allows
you to compare your progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the
research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode
at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, not available in all
states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
Pluto TV has thousands of free movies and TV shows.
You swear?
If I'm mine, I'm done.
This is the mindset.
Free.
This is the mantra.
Free.
This is the...
Movies like Interstellar, Dream Girls, and Gladiator.
Are you not entertained?
And TV shows like Survivor?
SpongeBob Square Pants, the fairly odd parents and ghosts.
Pluto TV is always free.
Hazzah!
Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.
Investigators spread out in search of evidence.
They soon find the fifth victim, Opie Hughes.
She, too, was lying on her stomach and had sustained multiple gunshot wounds.
Investigators theorized that she had attempted to run from the killer or killers.
And so they called upon the assistance of the Texas Rangers.
They're essentially Texas version of the Bureau of Investigations.
There was very little evidence at the scene.
Their bodies and the bullets, and that was it.
Investigators are both baffled and horrified by the scene before them.
Five people had been brought to a remote oil field 12 miles away from where they were abducted,
lined up, and then shot dead under the cloak of darkness.
It shocked even the most seasoned investigators.
Mass murder on that scale in 83 was just unthinkable.
It was just beyond the pale of anything that they had ever envisioned.
When I found out what had taken place, I don't even know how I absorbed it.
It was like my whole world just fell apart.
At KFC, we were kind of like family.
That was our social life outside of our home.
And we had watched each other's children grow up and we're involved in each other's lives.
And I couldn't help but feel just awful that Mary's children wouldn't ever see her again.
Opie's children. It's just hard to imagine that.
I remember my dad getting a phone call, and I remember him going outside and just kind of
breaking down on his truck. And then the next thing I can remember is Kim, my step-sister,
pulling into the driveway, and she was in hysterics. She couldn't stop her car. So I remember
someone, like, kind of slipping into the driver's side window and, like, pulling the emergency
break. The investigation
into the gruesome case begins at the
last place all five victims
were seen, KFC.
Texas Ranger Glenn Elliott is
looking at things and notices a box
lid with a distinctive blood
spatter pattern. Blood spatter
science is just starting to take off.
And he believes that it's high velocity
and that somebody's been hit and that blood's
moved that way and hit that box lid.
And in the back room there's a napkin
and he forms the opinion that was
cast off blood. Just like somebody had
had a bloody nose or something.
And so that did interest that ranger.
But it didn't necessarily interest most officers at the time.
Fingerprint was the science of the day in 1983.
And so they were really going heavy with fingerprint dust
and trying to lift prints from cash register from the counter from everywhere.
The next day, all five of the victims are transported to the medical examiner's office for their autopsy.
The medical examiner determined that at least two different weapons,
were used, a 38 and a 357.
He speculates that there could have been a third weapon
because there are several kinds of bullets.
Investigators now know that they are searching
for two killers, possibly even three.
During Joey's autopsy, a fingernail
fell from the waistband of his jeans,
but further examination reveals
that he had no torn fingernails.
And the Ranger was convinced that this must belong
to the killer.
And so they're immediately looking for this person who may be missing a fingernail.
The investigation is already in full swing by the time the funerals begin five days later.
The day that it actually set in with Denise and I was the day of her funeral.
Then we realized Mary is not coming home.
James Stroud, David Maxwell's friend, remembers his funeral well.
I remember Davey's funeral carrying his casket.
and there's still this disbelief.
This hadn't happened.
I first met David.
I can't remember exactly if it was eighth or ninth grade.
David was a new guy in school,
and he was just a laid-back guy.
He laughed a lot.
David was known as a kind and considerate man.
He had been married for less than a year
and had just recently learned that he and his wife
were expecting their first child together.
David was over the moon and couldn't wait to be a father.
He was working at KFC so that he could put himself through college and then support his blossoming family.
I remember the funeral ending.
It was back to this, you know, why aren't they doing something?
Why hadn't there been an arrest made?
The events that happened are almost like an anchor that drew me in the direction of law enforcement.
Made a decision to go to the academy to become a police officer.
Investigators are trying to find a suspect in the murders.
They turn their attention to nefarious characters that are well known to law enforcement.
Law enforcement were talking to all of the near-de-wells.
Jimmer Olmankins Jr. was just generally kind of known as one of the local troublemakers.
His father was a former state legislator who was very well-respected Jim Rell Mankin, senior.
But Jr. had problems with the law for a number of years.
He was a known drug dealer.
They bring Jimmy Macon's Jr. in to be questioned.
He willingly comes in, does a non-custodial interview,
and they end up examining his hands
because they already have the lead of the fingernail.
And that's when they notice that the middle finger on his right hand,
the fingernail was torn all the way down to the quick.
That KFC restaurant reopened, and I was scared.
You know, you were jumpy and nervous,
and several employees quit,
I would think about all of them all the time.
Often, something would trigger a memory.
Sometimes somebody will say something funny
that makes you think about Joey.
He was a prankster, and people saying,
oh, Joey, you know,
and it was extremely hard.
As loved ones say their final goodbyes,
investigators get their first solid lead,
a missing fingernail on the hand
of 30-year-old Jim Earl Mankins Jr.
Investigators take a number of photographs of his finger,
and then when the fingernail grows back, they take clippings.
In 1983, the prevailing view in the forensic scientific community
was that fingernails were distinctive just like fingerprints,
and they would be able to look on the underside of the fingernail
and see what they refer to as triations through a microscope.
Investigators send the fingernail clippings to a laboratory in Dallas,
where techs compare them to the fingernail found during Joey's autopsy.
They also dig deeper into Mankins.
They quickly learn that on the day of the murders,
Mankins had just gotten out of jail for unlawfully being in possession of a weapon.
The weapon was confiscated, and he borrowed another weapon, 38, as I recall, from one of his friends.
And there was a 38 that was believed to be one of the murder weapons.
and the ballistics guys told him,
I can't say this 38 is anymore the gun that killed these people
than any other 38 on earth.
But, I mean, him having a 38 definitely moved him up
in the category of people that law enforcement was interested in.
When this all occurred, there was lots of rumors
that drugs were being sold out of, like, the drive-thru window,
at the Kentucky, and that someone at the restaurant had a drug recipe.
Rumors had been circulating.
for a while that someone who worked at this establishment had owned a recipe for a high-grade
methamphetamine drug. I had heard that Mankins wanted their recipe, and that was why it had happened.
The FBI joined into this investigation fairly early on because there were thoughts of drug
involvement. The agent who worked the case for the FBI was George Keeney. The rumors about Mankins
are further compounded when the fingernail comparisons come back to investigators.
They make a confirmation, yes, this fingernail clipping that we've discovered matches this known individual.
While investigators build their case against Mankins, a tipster offers Texas Ranger Glenn Elliott,
solid information that kickstarts a parallel investigation.
Star Powers was her name, and on the night of the murders,
Star came in to the KFC just a few minutes before closing time.
saw an employee on the phone right by the counter, and she heard her say, somebody didn't make
the deposit today.
There's $2,000 in here.
And Starr remembered thinking to herself, oh, she shouldn't say that out loud.
And she noticed that there were two men immediately behind her, and she thought that they
heard the same thing.
There's an unusually large amount of money in the restaurant, and it certainly would have
look like a quick, easy score.
Maybe this is a target of opportunity.
What Star Powers told Ranger Elliott was certainly consistent with there being an armed robbery
that was maybe just a prime of opportunity.
Powers describes the men she'd seen at the KFC, and the Rangers reach out to local
police jurisdictions, hoping one of them can identify these men.
The then-Smith County Sheriff had a lot of confidential informants in the Smith
county jail, and he's the one that developed the lead and took it to the Rangers and said,
you need to look at these guys. Darnow Hartsfield and Romeo Pinkerton, there was a warrant
out for Darnel Hartsfield for committing an armed robbery in Tyler three days after the KFC.
The grocery store robbery happened just 30 miles from Kilgore, and it had striking
similarities to the KFC crime. It was close to closing time. They had webbed,
They got all of the money out of the register, all the petty cash money, everywhere they could get money,
and they made the women stay laying with their heads on their hands until they got away.
The Texas Rangers put together the wanted poster that includes Romeo Pinkerton and Darnell Hartsfield,
wanted for connection and questioning with a Kentucky Fried Chicken robbery.
There were obviously efforts to question them, but at the time,
time Hartfield had not been apprehended.
Investigators tracked down
Hartzfield's presumed accomplice,
Roman Pinkerton.
They bring him to police headquarters
for an interview.
Pinkerton has an alibi.
He says he was still in prison
at the time of the murders,
so he couldn't have been involved.
He was only released from prison
a couple of days after the KFC robbery
and murders.
Every year I tell myself,
this is the year
I'll actually stick to meal planning.
And then life laughs and says, sure you will. Between work, friends, and those nights when I just don't feel like cooking, it usually falls apart by February. But this time, I started using Marley Spoon and that changed everything. What I love is that Marley Spoon actually adapts with you. Some nights I want to channel my inner chef and other nights, I just want dinner done and in front of me fast. They've got ready to cook, ready to heat, and ready to eat options. Plus snacks and drinks for those I forgot to eat lunch moments. Life constantly changed.
and so does how we eat. At the table, on the couch, even standing over the sink, no judgment.
Marley Spoon is evolving right along with us, making it easy to eat well, however your day looks.
They give you over 100 recipes to choose from each week, from comforting classics like
chicken milanays with cucumber arugula salad, to fresh balanced dishes like everything bagel
salmon with truffle, chive, potatoes, and green beans. All made with quality ingredients.
There's something for every mood. My favorite recent meal was their honey, soy chicken with
garlic rice. It was simple, easy, and genuinely delicious. Marley Spoon is so flexible. It fits my life
instead of the other way around. Go to marlyspoon.com slash offer slash cold case for up to 25
free meals. That's right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That's Marley Spoon.com
slash offer slash cold case for up to 25 free meals. After searching for several weeks,
Tyler Police find Darnell Hartsfield and they charge him with the grocery store robbery.
Hartsfield is interviewed by Ranger Dowell in regards to the murders.
He staunchly denies any involvement.
He polygraphed him as they did with, gosh, almost 100 people probably.
And he passed the polygraph, and so he was done at that point.
So they quit studying him.
That just became a dead end.
Investigators continue working on the Mankin's drug angle,
hoping that they can unearth a clue that results in charges being filed.
There has to be some sort of job.
justification to take the lives of five people. To say that it was a robbery over such a small
amount of money seemed so horribly mean. They got a ton of tips. Things developed from a bunch of
different sources, and they all circulated around the idea that it was Manchin's. They did all kinds of
things to try to develop additional evidence. I mean, there was a period of time. Mankins was in prison
subsequent to the crime,
and they wired a cell made up to get recordings,
and they never got anything meaningful.
The fingernail linking Mankins
to the torn fingernail found on Joey
is the only real evidence investigators have on him.
And it's certainly not enough
to bring forth a murder charge.
With nothing else to go on,
the case eventually begins to go cold.
Nothing was being accomplished,
and Denise and I did what we could.
We pushed the issue.
called and push and write letters and say, hey, you know, something's got to be done.
These people were still out there. It could happen to someone else's family.
The months gradually transform into years, and by 1993, it's approaching the 10th year anniversary
of the murders. The family members left behind try their hardest to pick up the pieces,
but their grief and heartache is amplified by the fact that the killers of their loved ones
have not been brought to justice.
On the 10-year anniversary of the crime,
there was a lot of press, a lot of media,
and the victim's family members,
went to the local district attorney
and asked him to call in the Attorney General's office for assistance.
I called every week.
I called twice a week, sometimes three times a week,
and I'm sure they got tired of me calling.
DA, Kyle Freeman, felt a commitment to these families
to get the case solved.
District attorney Kyle Freeman asks,
Texas Attorney General Dan Morales for help.
Dan Morales makes a commitment to solving the case, and he does devote a lot of resources.
In the 10 years since the murders, there have been major advances in forensic science.
Investigators want to use these advances to take another look at the fingernail they found during Joey's autopsy.
When you're dealing with evidence, it has to be conclusive. It has to be tangible.
And DNA at that time was becoming such a big word.
The fingernail was submitted to a lab in Dallas for DNA testing that was state of the art at the time,
and they did get one result that was consistent with Mankins.
It's enough for the district attorney to convene a grand jury to weigh the evidence against Mankins in March 1995.
They were attempting to reach an indictment for Jimmer Mankins, and I was called as a witness.
And there was a sense of relief that finally, something, you know, something finally good, because there had been nothing.
Prosecutors take seven weeks to present their evidence to the grand jury.
And finally, the cold case begins to heat up.
Mencken's is indicted by the grand jury on the five murders after they determine there is enough evidence collected for prosecutors to convince a jury that he was involved.
We were finally getting somewhere.
it was like it was a beginning to an end.
Mencken waits in jail for his day in court.
Prosecutors hoped to strengthen their case against him
with iron-clad forensic evidence.
Eventually, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was brought in.
They were the top-of-the-line state-of-the-art lab in the world.
We were scheduled for a conference call with the lab,
and we were all around this big table,
and the DNA analyst got on the phone
and she said, okay, I have results.
And we were all looking at the speaker phone.
And she said, yeah, it's not his nail.
You could just hear a pin drop.
The development is a massive blow to the prosecution's case.
And with no other evidence to link Mankins to the murders,
the charges against him are dropped.
I remember just being angry.
You kind of lay your hope on something
and you can begin some process of getting some healing.
of families moving forward.
After being locked up for six months,
Jim Earl Mankins Jr. is once again a free man.
Some within the local community
fear that Mankin's father is using his connections
to cover up the crime.
Everybody was thinking that because of who his dad was,
the state representative for the state of Texas,
that his daddy was helping him out of it.
His dad was keeping stuff hush, hush.
The case against Mankins was based mostly on the fingernail.
And without it, the case goes cold once again.
We just went back to pushing again, calling, writing letters and doing what we could.
You know, this day and age is different from back then.
Is there anything that y'all could do different now that y'all could have done?
When I was elected sheriff, 1996, I would think about it off and on.
I guess I accepted that it was a cold case.
That day I met George Kenneek, who was a retired FBI agent.
That completely changed.
Matter of fact, everything changed.
I would think about David.
Anytime I drove through Kilgore, every time I saw that KFC,
it just brought back thoughts.
It just over and over and over again.
I just felt a desire for justice.
Somebody did this.
Somebody needs to pay up.
It's now been 17 years since the murders.
In those 17 years, David's,
friend James Stroud has become sheriff.
He never forgot about his good friend David
and the tragic KFC murders that couldn't be solved.
But now, he's sheriff, and he thinks there's something he can do about it.
He enlists the help of retired FBI agent George Keeney,
who worked on the case back in the 1980s.
We agreed the best thing to do was just to take fresh eyes
and begin looking at everything again.
Retired FBI agent George Keeney
applies new forensic techniques
to old evidence taken from the crime scene at KFC.
He tests a blood-stained napkin
and the cashier's tape box,
looking for a link to the killer or killers.
The blood on the cardboard box
that had held the cash register tape
came back to be consistent with a Darnell-Hartsfield
and the blood on the napkin
with Romeo Pinkerton.
Both men were suspects back in 1983, but they were both cleared by investigators initially.
Romeo Pinkerton claimed that he was only released from prison a couple of days after the KFC robbery and murders.
And his claim was based on a hurricane, that it was not until after this hurricane had gone through.
So it made sense, in hindsight, you weren't able to check things as quickly back then because there wasn't an internet.
They were able to check the records, and he was actually released from prison a couple of days before the KFC murders.
We had a meeting with all five families shortly after the hits came in,
and once I pulled the wanted poster out and showed them, several members of the family started to cry
because you saw the realization that these guys had been there all along,
and we just didn't have the science to prove it.
Looking for more evidence, investigators take a closer look at the victim's clothing.
They use UV lights that reveal semen stains on Opie Hughes pants.
That was a huge epiphany for us.
Law enforcement had early on explained away her being away from everybody else
by saying, well, she's the one who tried to run.
Finding out that Opie had been raised,
was like getting hit by a train.
I never saw that coming, and my heart just broke.
Opie was the kindless, gentlest person.
She wouldn't her to flee.
And it's almost like they took the most innocent.
I just, I couldn't even process it for a long time.
Investigators submit cuttings of Opie's pants to the lab for DNA analysis.
The DNA result doesn't match Pinkerton or Hart's field.
We just all looked at each other and just thought, oh God, here we go again.
There's a third person that's out there.
The DNA found on Opie's pants doesn't match anybody involved, including Opie's husband
or the original suspect, Jim Earl Manchin's Jr.
There was no evidence to time.
Mankins took it for so many years.
They believed the case is solved.
This person did it.
Well, they didn't do it.
The striation science really didn't hold up in hindsight.
And I submit that science has proven incorrect and again took this case down the wrong path for many, many years, unfortunately.
On November 17, 2005, over 22 years after the murders took place, a grand jury handed down 10 capital murder indictments, five each against Arnail Hartsfield and Romeo Pinkerton.
To avoid the death penalty, Pinkerton accepts a deal and pleads guilty to five counts of murder.
The judge hands him five life sentences.
Hartsfield decides to take his chances with the jury.
During the trial, prosecutors describe what they believe happened on that horrific night back in 1983.
I believe they were there as customers in the restaurant and they overhear that the deposit hadn't been made.
They go out to make a quick, easy score by coming back when the restaurant closes up,
Joey Johnson to cook that night, he's taken out the trash in the back and force them,
back into the restaurant to let them in, and somehow inside it ends up being a struggle in the
restaurant. And that's where it was a robbery that just went bad. And I think that felt like
they had no choice but to eliminate the victims. Darnell Hartsfield is convicted on all five
capital murders and is sentenced to life in prison. The third person involved in the murders,
tragically, still remains unidentified to this day. But still, investigators remain determined to track down
this final suspect so that he too can feel the wrath of justice.
So many people over the years have made a commitment that until they leave this world,
they will keep searching for the truth and for that final person.
Yes, they've gotten two. Okay.
But there's still a part of us that's not able to move forward because there's no closure.
It hurts.
It's not one each individual victim.
I think of him sort of like
a family.
They each had each other that night.
And so when the hues don't have that closure,
we don't have that closure.
But it's coming.
It may not be today.
May not even be tomorrow or a week from now.
But it's coming.
Cold Case Files is hosted by Paula Barrows.
It's produced by the Law and Crime Network
and written by Eileen McFarlane and Emily G. Thompson.
Our composer is Blake Maples.
For A&E, our C.
Senior producer is John Thrasher, and our supervising producer is McCaamy Lynn.
Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Mai Te Kueva, and Peter Tarshis.
This podcast is based on A&E's Emmy-winning TV series Cold Case Files.
For more cold case files, visit AETV.com.
Thousands of free movies and TV shows.
You swear?
If I'm lying.
This is the mindset.
Free.
This is the mantra.
Free.
This is the...
Movies like Interstellar, Dreamgirls and Gladiator.
Are you not entertained?
And TV shows like Survivor?
SpongeBob SquarePants, the Fairly Odd Parents and Ghosts.
Pluto TV is always free.
Hazzal.
Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.
